Time To Focus On Boys

[Annie]

Links at site.

http://www.goactablog.org/blog/archives/2005/09/#a000077

Something else for Margaret Spellings

As long as Margaret Spellings has resolved to study American higher education in order to get a sense of where the problems are and how the system might be improved, she would do well to consider an increasingly pressing question: Where are all the men?

USA Today notes that these days, 135 women are graduating from college for every 100 men. The U.S. Department of Education projects that the gap will grow in coming years. Some sobering facts: The unemployment rate for men between the ages of 20 and 24 is 10.1%, or twice the national average. There are almost as many men in jail, on probation, and on parole (5,000,000) as there are men in college (7,300,000). Men with college educations earn an average of $47,000 per year; those whose education ended at the high school diploma earn an average of $30,000. What's happening to young men's prospects in this country is devastating. It's also not surprising, given the manner in which K-12 education has been reshaped to favor girls and disadvantage boys--something Christina Hoff Sommers documents in damning detail in The War Against Boys.

A generation of young men is losing out in a very big way. But there is no real outrage as higher education becomes a feminized system. Indeed, the outrage is still running the other way--we hear continually about the marginalization of women in the academy, and the difficulties women students face. The question of why there are so few women in the hard sciences draws impassioned debate, urgent calls for equity, and lots and lots of money. But the question of why young men are disappearing from campus is not even being widely asked. And it certainly isn't being studied systematically. It should be, and Margaret Spellings has the power to ensure that it is.

Posted by acta online at 10:10 AM

 

[Hobbit]

Oppression of women in higher education? HA! I've been encouraged to pretty much suppress anything masculine about myself in the classroom since elementary.

 

[Annie]

Oppression of women in higher education? HA! I've been encouraged to pretty much suppress anything masculine about myself in the classroom since elementary.

I wonder if parents are going to notice what is happening statistically? Education departments are totally able to ignor this kind of study. There will be little or no effort to follow up on it. That will have to come from sociology or psychology. Interesting though.

 

[Nuc]

Men are no longer permitted to act like men in this society. The boys grow up not knowing how to behave. No surprise they are floundering.

 

[dilloduck]

Men are no longer permitted to act like men in this society. The boys grow up not knowing how to behave. No surprise they are floundering.

Agreed-----over the years the feminist and civil rights movements with the help of lawyers and societal pressures have succeeded in handicapping white males to the point where they feel that there is no point in competing. When less qualified people are given "legal" advantages, what's the point?
They are still being forced to pay for the so called "sins of thier fathers" and raised by mothers to be submissive and dependent.

While many mothers have not fallen for the "emasculate your son" mantra, way too many have.

 

[dmp]

Men are no longer permitted to act like men in this society. The boys grow up not knowing how to behave. No surprise they are floundering.

'my' boy will be different.



:2guns:

 

[Hobbit]

Yeah, it's bad. I'm just glad I stayed in touch with my masculinity. It's funny, really. So many guys act like girls, being all sensitive and soft and whatnot, then wonder why it's guys like me that have an easier time with girls. I'll tell you why. It's because there's only one type of girl that's going to like a guy who's girlish, and that's a closet lesbian. Girls like *guys*, not girls with male parts.

 

[Abbey Normal]

That is a startling statistic.

When Laura Bush announced her agenda for the second term was to focus on the boys in this country (many of whom who she felt were being shortchanged and were in crisis), libs on MB's were all but calling her a moron. How dare anyone take the spotlight off of girls? You know, it's just to anti-PC for them to even contemplate.

 

[Annie]

That is a startling statistic.

When Laura Bush announced her agenda for the second term was to focus on the boys in this country (many of whom who she felt were being shortchanged and were in crisis), libs on MB's were all but calling her a moron. How dare anyone take the spotlight off of girls? You know, it's just to anti-PC for them to even contemplate.

I have sons and a daughter, I want them all to get as much education as they can. I expect the schools to hold them to fair standards, taking into account individual needs as much as possible, (which is NEVER as much as parents think the schools should).

I do think the schools have done too much to enforce girl behaviors on boys, while at the same time, encouraging girls to become more aggressive. Trust me those with younger kids, more girls are hitting on guys more directly, than vice versa-at least around here.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Maybe we're reverting to a pre-civilization matriarchal system in which females rule the roost. In that case, be gentle with me mama!

Some blame the so-called degeneration of the modern male on the role models that adolescent males are presented with in the media. i.e., Tom Green, the Jackass guys, P Diddy, etc. This stereotypical male character is called a "Moop" by those in the televison industry.

Has anyone ever seen the Frontline documentary, "The Merchants of Cool"?

It's an oldie but a goody.

 

[Annie]

Links at both sites:

http://techcentralstation.com/092705B.html

Where the Boys Aren't
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds Published 09/27/2005

I like to walk around campus on nice days, and sometimes I take pictures. When I post them on my blog, people always comment on the number of women in them. But, in fact, that's a pretty accurate reflection of what college campuses look like these days. (Fellow photoblogging professor Ann Althouse has noticed the same thing.)

Last week, an article in USA Today underscored that this imbalance in favor of women isn't just an impression, but fact:

Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education.

This is ominous for every parent with a male child. The decline in college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success in life. The loss of educated workers also means the country will be less able to compete economically. The social implications -- women having a hard time finding equally educated mates -- are already beginning to play out.

But the inequity has yet to provoke the kind of response that finally opened opportunities for women a generation ago. In fact, virtually no one is exploring the obvious questions: What has gone wrong? And what happens to all the boys who aren't in college?

Some of them, of course, get good-paying jobs that don't require a college degree. Plumbers, electricians, and building contractors face their own sets of barriers, but they don't need a college degree. (And, as an upside, those jobs aren't likely to be outsourced.) Still, it seems to me that there are three possible ways of looking at the growing higher-education gender imbalance.

One would be to treat it the way we treat other "underrepresentation" issues in higher education: By wondering what universities are doing wrong. There seems little doubt that universities have become less male-friendly in recent decades, to the point of being downright unfriendly in many cases. The kind of statements that are routinely made about males and masculinity in classrooms and hallways would get professors fired if they were made about blacks, gays, or many other groups. Sexual-harassment policies start with the presumption that men are guilty, and inherently depraved. And colleges now come at the tail-end of an educational system that is (compared to previous decades) anti-male from kindergarten on, meaning many males probably just want to get out as soon as they can.

The remedy, in this view: Affirmative action for male candidates, re-education for faculty, campus "men's centers" to match the womens' centers that were created when women were an underrepresented group on campus (and which still remain today almost everywhere), and efforts to make curricula, dormitories, and recruiting more male-friendly. (Right now, though we see lots of courses on literature by and about women, courses on literature by and about men are regarded as too narrow.") There seems little doubt that if any other group were suffering similar declines in college attendance, this is precisely the approach we'd be seeing, and some schools have already been trying this to some degree.

The second approach would be to shrug the problem off. Men aren't going to college as much? Big deal. Maybe it's because women are smarter, or better suited to such things.

Harvard President Larry Summers got his head handed to him when he raised similar factors as an explanation for why women are underrepresented in the hard sciences. But genetic explanations of gender differences are always socially acceptable so long as they posit male inferiority, so I suspect we'll see somewhat more people offering this sort of explanation -- though it may prove awkward when people point out the contradictions.

The third possibility is that men aren't so much underrepresented in college as women are overrepresented. This is plausible. There probably are too many people going to college in general, and it may be that men -- more likely to choose, or at least consider, high-paying but unfeminine alternatives like plumbing, or other, more "masculine" alternatives like military service -- are less likely to wind up in college as an unthinking extension of high school. If this explanation is true, we can expect to hear little about it from university administrations, who have fully absorbed the marketer's ethos and have little interest in suggesting that college isn't for everyone.

I would suggest, though, that the issue is of national import, and deserves more attention. As Larry Summers noted -- to his chagrin, but accurately nonetheless -- the hard sciences are still a largely male area (though they're managing to chase many men away, too), and there's not much prospect of more women getting involved. If men in general are reluctant to enter higher education, then the growing shortage of American-born scientists and engineers (noted by Ray Kurzweil here) is likely to get worse. This is likely to have significant national security implications.

Who knows? Maybe congressional hearings are in the offing. Perhaps they should be.

Here's another related:

http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2005/09/what-about-men-2.html

Tuesday, September 27, 2005
What about the men? (2)
Amidst all these discussions of Future Desperate Housewives of the Ivy League, there's another story that's finally getting some notice: while some women are mommy-tracking themselves while still in college, many men aren't in college, period.

USA Today reports:

Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education.



Glenn Reynolds discusses the issue here. (See also an interesting thread at Ann Althouse.)

This is not really a new story: Women were already graduating from college in higher numbers than men in 1992, when the American Association of Unviersity Women (AAUW) raised a false alarm about girls being "shortchanged" by gender bias. But in recent years the imbalance has been getting worse. For more on this ongoing debate and the data, see my 2001 article in Reason, Where the Boys Are. See also University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld's excellent paper, The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception.

Why is this hapenning? And is it a problem? One common explanation is that men are off doing lucrative things that don't require a college diploma -- launching Internet start-ups, for instance, or getting jobs in the blue-collar trades. (But how many of these men really do well? Plumbers and welders may make good money, but a lot of men in the trades face chronic job insecurity and low income. As USA Today points out, "The unemployment rate for young men ages 20-24 is 10.1%, twice the national rate".) There are also more men in the armed services. Clearly a college diploma is not the only path to a good life. But there is a lot of evidence that many of the "missing men" are in trouble. By the way, if you look at the statistics, it's clear that the college gender gap is most pronounced among African-Americans (for some years now, black females in college have outnumbered black men about 2:1) and low-income people.

In addition to gender differences in enrollment, men seem to fare worse once they do get to college. According to federal statistics, of the men who entered college in 1996, only 28% graduated in 4 years or less, compared to 38% of the women; the six-year graduation rate was over 58% for women but only 52% for the men.

That brings us back to the "why." Some observers, such as Kleinfeld, say that a big part of the problem is that young men today tend to be less motivated and less focused than their female peers. (Father absence may be one factor in this.) Others see gender bias in the education system. Says Reynolds:

There seems little doubt that universities have become less male-friendly in recent decades, to the point of being downright unfriendly in many cases. The kind of statements that are routinely made about males and masculinity in classrooms and hallways would get professors fired if they were made about blacks, gays, or many other groups. Sexual-harassment policies start with the presumption that men are guilty, and inherently depraved. And colleges now come at the tail-end of an educational system that is (compared to previous decades) anti-male from kindergarten on, meaning many males probably just want to get out as soon as they can.



Some of the people I interviewed for my Reason article expressed the same view. Bret Burkholder, a counselor at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington, who also works with younger boys as a baseball coach, told me, "If you listen to 10- or 11-year-old boys, you will hear that school is not a very happy place for them. It's a place where they're consistently made to feel stupid, where girls can walk around in T-shirts that say 'Girls rule, boys drool,' but if a boy makes a negative comment about girls he'll have the book thrown at him."

There is some evidence to back this up. Here are some data from a 1990 survey of high school students conducted for the AAUW, and spun as evidence of girls' precariously low self-esteem. When asked, "Who do teachers think are smarter, boys or girls?", 69% of boys and 81% of girls said "girls." 81% of boys and 89% of girls thought teachers complimented girls more often, while about 90% of both boys and girls said that teachers punished boys more often. On the question, "Who do teachers like to be around?," 73% of boys and 80% of girls said, "Girls." (See Kleinfeld's study, Table 16, for these data.) On the other hand, it is also worth nothing that when the children are asked about their own experiences, boys are only slightly less likely than girls to say that teachers listen to them, that they often get called on and encouraged, and that discipline and grading at their school are fair. I think it's quite an exaggeration to claim, as some do, that males have become "the second sex" in the educational system as a whole. I find male victimism to be as off-putting as the female variety.

One more point to ponder: While conservatives commonly point to political correctness and "feminization" as factors that discourage male involvement in the educational system, few pay attention to the effects of the traditionally masculine jock culture that holds learning in contempt as a "girlie" thing.

The bottom line? This is an issue that needs to be looked into. For years, academic organizations (not just feminist ones but mainstream ones such as the Association of American Colleges) have been trumpeting reports about an alleged "chilly climate" for women on campus. Maybe it's time to pay a little attention to the guys? Glenn Reynolds suggests congressional hearings. I have my doubts about the efficacy of such ventures, but if no one else gets moving, it could be, at least, a start.

 

[Mr. P]

I wonder if parents are going to notice what is happening statistically? Education departments are totally able to ignor this kind of study. There will be little or no effort to follow up on it. That will have to come from sociology or psychology. Interesting though.

More important...will women be able to ignore that now that they can, “bring home the bacon” which goes along with the womans’ equality stuff, be able to handle the “NEW WORLD” that they so wanted?

From what I’ve seen, NOPE.

 

[Nuc]

More important...will women be able to ignore that now that they can, “bring home the bacon” which goes along with the womans’ equality stuff, be able to handle the “NEW WORLD” that they so wanted?

From what I’ve seen, NOPE.

Agreed. But don't forget that the corporate mentality (supported by the right) is one of the major factors in the current situation where a man can't bring home the bacon by himself anymore. That's something the right likes to conveniently forget when complaining about feminism.

 

[Hobbit]

It's what I've been saying for a long time. Women keep saying they want equality when what they actually want is preferential treatment. When they said they wanted equality in college sports, they invented Title IX, which means that the ratio between money spent on girls' athletic teams and guys' athletic teams must be the same as the girl/guy ratio of the student body. This sounds equal, but when you consider how much a football program costs before you count the fact that ticket sales, you'll realize that this is grossly unfair. At my college, despite student interest, the only men's teams are football, basketball, baseball, and track. Women have all those, minus football, plus soccer, gymnastics, swimming & diving, and several other sports.

And does anybody remember that chick a while back that tried to get into the Citadel? With her weight, she wouldn't have been accepted as a guy, but sued to get in. Right after she got in, she said the training regimin was too hard and demanded that it be scaled back for her.

Then there's the scores of girls who DEMAND that everyone stop treating them different from guys, except in the following areas:

Opening doors, picking up the check, protection from bad men, telling dirty jokes, anything physical, manners, eh, I'm sick of listing them. It's too long.

 

[Mr. P]

Agreed. But don't forget that the corporate mentality (supported by the right) is one of the major factors in the current situation where a man can't bring home the bacon by himself anymore. That's something the right likes to conveniently forget when complaining about feminism.

Of course he can, as long as we aren't living above our means.
Ahhhhhh that's the key.

 

[William Joyce]

I agree with a lot said in this thread. It's a shame that "manhood" today is defined by how much neat-o gadgetry you can buy and whether you have a "six-pack" stomach. In other words, be a consumer, be a man. Instead of, say, being honorable, fighting for what's right, standing up to do your duty, and so on. I also think it wreaks havoc on males that they've been deemed "unnecessary" by the NWO because women all have careers now. That's doing psychological harm that I doubt any liberals will want to investigate. Stable societies have distinct sex roles. And anyone notice that men today aren't even called "men," but "guys"? "Guys" don't build nations, MEN do.